Links
Serfing USA
Jeremiah Owyang : Chances are, you’re probably a serf.:
To modernize the last word of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin’s famed quote; “In antiquity, slaves were, in all honesty, called slaves. In the middle ages, they took the name of serfs. Nowadays they are called users.”
The underlying price of digital-only friendship
To Understand Facebook, Study Capgras Syndrome:
This withering of primate familiarity in the face of technology prompts us to mistake an acquaintance for a friend, just because the two of you have a Snapchat streak for the last umpteen days, or because you both like all the same Facebook pages. It allows us to become intimate with people whose familiarity then proves false. After all, we can now fall in love with people online whose hair we have never smelled.
Remembering the weird internet that was
A couple of great quotes from a piece by Owen Williams on Medium (shudder):
But when we lose the weird internet, we don’t just lose a space where people could tinker and make things for themselves. We seem to have lost the curiosity that inspired that weirdness in the first place.
And this:
The internet made it possible to build something out of thin air without millions of dollars in funding. It’s important we don’t forget that, because it’s the best way to learn and evolve.
Well now. I did a vlog from Scotland. Vlogging is really not my thing. What do you think?
Your data is the fuel for parties you're not invited to
The Global Economy Runs on Parties You’re Not Invited To:
As went the ad business, so will go the rest of the economy: The robots may take over — but for a certain class of moneyed titan, the beaches will always remain topless, the drinks bottomless and high-end schmoozing will never die.
Disturbing look at how the internet didn’t dis intermediate elites — it just allowed a whole new class to develop.
The New Wilderness
No two companies have done more to drag private life into the algorithmic eye than Google and Facebook. Together, they operate the world’s most sophisticated dragnet surveillance operation, a duopoly that rakes in nearly two thirds of the money spent on online ads. You’ll find their tracking scripts on nearly every web page you visit. They can no more function without surveillance than Exxon Mobil could function without pumping oil from the ground.
This is a fundamental, unavoidable truth of both their business models.
This starts off as road crash viewing of a middle-aged meme warrior - but actually goes somewhere interesting.
How we Dooced blogging — and its community
This Vox profile of Heather Armstrong — Dooce — is a deeply melancholy read:
In the time that Armstrong had been absent from her site, bloggers had been almost wholly replaced with social media stars who relied on Instagram to gain a following. The word “influencer” had taken over, and quickly. Bloggers had risen to fame thanks to deeply personal posts; Instagram personalities operated in a much more visual medium, relying on photos of cute kids and beautiful homes for likes.
It’s both affecting in its coverage of her mental health issues, but also in how clear it makes it that we lost something profound in the shift from blogger to influencer.
Lots to think on.
What’s that sound? Oh, it’s the influencer bubble popping:
”Most global internet users lack confidence in what they see and read online, with only 8% believing that the bulk of information shared on social media is true, dropping to 4% when it comes from influencers.”
Ooops.
My goodness, but these are appealing to me.
News that will fill my daughters with joy in the morning - but which is filling me with dread, because I’m going to end up watching it 9,732 times: The Frozen 2 teaser trailer is here.
And I will not let it go.
The Freelancer Mindset: it's a trap!
The Psychological Trap of Freelancing
People who attach dollar signs to their time — or “value time like money” — tend to be overwhelmingly less happy than those who don’t, because their nonworking hours suddenly seem less important. “Free” time gets tainted with guilt because there’s a cost associated with it.
I suffer from this, and have to talk myself down from it on a periodic basis. Comforting (in a way) to know I’m not alone.